chelsea wood thank you for joining me today on acquiring minds no thank you for having me chelsea you run the acquisition lab which is a cohort based intensive program and community for acquisition entrepreneurs it was founded by walker dibel author of buy then build people will recognize that name it's the book that nearly every acquisition entrepreneur that i interview has read we're going to hear more about in a sec about what the lab actually does but the bottom line is that you have come on today to share some of the key reasons that searchers fail to acquire a business so through running the acquisition lab you've seen a wide cross-section of searchers dozens and dozens i think i think 250 plus is what you told me so who better than you to identify some of these patterns some of these challenges that routinely trip people up as they embark on their search to buy business so i'm excited for this i think today's conversation will help listeners get out of their own way before we dive in before we dive into that tell us a little bit about your history and yourself chelsea um i am the managing director of the lab i joined walker at the end of february of 2020. um i am also an mda advisor with just the other side of the spectrum from walker right so he's done everything in the main street to middle market space he's bought sold owned operated probably worked at um whereas i did corporate development that's how i got into transactions and so i managed transactions for a large health care system for a number of years uh we grew from three billion to six billion through transactions uh bring over about 18 000 employees uh that was awesome very early in my career it stopped being awesome once i got married and had a child that i never saw and so i resigned i am an industrial organizational psychologist by training and so consulting is what i'm kind of groomed to do now um and so i figured i could go back into consulting and if i did that i would see my child more and so i did that because even if i traveled 80 i would still work from home when i wasn't traveling and so i did that for five years but right away i was consulting with small and medium-sized companies and often after a transaction had kind of gone off the rails and what i realized was my understanding of transactions and what they had done was not the same and so my understanding of transactions was very institutional very complex and so what i needed to do was i needed to understand the transactions that my clients had gone through so that i could adapt my methodologies and kind of rethink my structures in my head and so the firm that i worked for had a professional development budget so the first year i was there i took it and went to this program through the alliance of mma advisors i was the very odd one out as it was mostly men or almost all men i think it was a lawyer continues it was lawyers investment bankers accountants um and then me and walker and so that is how i met walker about seven years ago and so i went through this program got certified as an mma advisor don't ask me tax questions that that section i failed the rest of them were golden um and so i did that for uh consulted for five years i had my second child um and didn't want to travel anymore because i wasn't seeing my second tiny human you'll see a theme here i create these things and i want to be around them um and so i i had resigned again i had taken a local position here in st louis that would lessen the travel but i had one conference left to speak at and that was january of 2020 and walker just happened to be there accepting an award and i saw him in the hallway i hadn't really talked to him much honestly since the certification um program i did buy his book i did cinema congrats when i saw his book come out um and so i saw him the hallway i was like hey any chance you've heard of this company i have this opportunity to potentially take a um executive offer just curious if you've heard of the company uh we've run in very different circles but we're both from st louis and so um he's like oh i didn't know you were looking don't do anything i have an idea i'm like no no no no i'm not looking i've already accepted one job this is another option don't need more options i'm a little confused as it is and so he's like just let me call you tomorrow and so he calls me the next day and he's like people are following me around at conferences they're fighting me on linkedin they're messaging me on facebook they really want somebody to help them buy a business he said and i can't do that i don't have the bandwidth that you could do and this is because his book at this point had become quite successful correct and when you met him that first time around at that at that at that training he had not yet written the book he was active doing businesses but he had not written the book okay so so then you meet him a second time in the hall and he's a celebrity okay and so he's like you know you could come and build this company for me and like you said we're over 250 members now uh inching closer to 300 this week um and so and so tell us tell us a little bit exactly about what the what the lab does chelsea it's a live do it with you program where we hold your hand as you buy a business um so i am the day-to-day kind of contact i do everything for the lab i'm the one that does one-on-ones with our session or with our members like if they want to look at a deal and they want somebody to kind of tear it apart with them initially um if they want to talk about marriage challenges i keep getting calls about marriage challenges buying a business is stressful i get it um so much so that i'm thinking about starting a spouse's support group um but it's right i'm there as a thought partner that's what i love to do and that's what i'm good at and so the lab is really there to um teach you how to how to buy business and then to hold your hand and coach you through it as you do it and so it's a structured four week onboarding process where we really focus solely on getting you ready to go to market um what walker and i believe is and this is comes from my i o um psychology background but like there's no sense in teaching you things that you don't need right now and so all we focus on in our intensive is getting you ready to go to market the rest of it will support in the moment it's like on-the-job training right like the worst thing in walker in my opinion is certification programs where you learn everything and then you apply nothing and then you lose it all and so we wanted to focus on making sure that we could be there with you when you needed us and so the four week program is um it's a dual track program the first track is all about getting you ready as a buyer it's all live sessions um really focusing on helping you define your target statement defining your value proposition as a buyer um making sure that you understand what it means to get an sba loan and having the opportunity to ask all of the dumb questions quote unquote right that you're too scared to ask someone else and then just giving you an opportunity to ask walker any questions that haven't been answered through either the live sessions or the pre-recorded course that drops um which is track two and that's where we teach you how to get deal flow moving which is week one week two is how to evaluate deals once they start flowing and then the third one is how to analyze the deals and that's like your three year forecasting your breakeven analysis your scenario planning tools those kind of things and that's all taught through a case study right again the i o background you need to be able to apply the things we're teaching you for it to really take hold in your mind um and so we give you that opportunity let's get into everything that you've learned about why searchers fail um from from working with so many of them and oh and as a as a one more data point what percentage of folks that go through the lab close actually acquire a business it's kind of hard for me to estimate honestly because there's so many people just now getting started right and the average search has been about eight to ten months if it's a pretty broad search if it's uh specific that it's running more like a 12 month search um but we've had about 40 closings i haven't counted lately every time i announce how much we have then people are like hey i forgot to tell you i closed uh so i think we're somewhere around 40 a little north of 40 probably um and we have probably 50 people that are new to the search um and so we always have about 20 to 25 deals live like at different stages whether that's like new prepping loi in the loi in due diligence or falling apart which every time they fall apart no more come on every time i count it's like we almost always have 20 deals live so that number the 40 out of let's call it 200 250 so let's call it 20 ish is actually a really strong number so if you if you think about it it's like oh one in five doesn't seem like a lot but in the world of search it's very high performance but that's also an indication of how difficult the world of search is and how many people are attracted to it but actually never consummate a deal so why don't they consummate deals chelsea give us give us uh one of the reasons um that that that this happens or doesn't happen is the case maybe well i think there's a couple of like i'll say challenges because who knows if they're they're not failing yet they could still close it could be a long right yeah um and so the challenges that they have i would say the very first thing that i see pretty consistently and i don't know if this is symptomatic of first-time buyers but it could be is they everybody comes and talks to me about joining the lab and they want to be an expert in everything and so they'll say like are you going to teach me how to do due diligence no i can't teach you how to do due diligence you could go to a four-year college get an accounting degree go work in the workplace for 10 years and still not know how to do due diligence right and so i do think that there's a desire from buyers to to know everything and the key to actually executing well is just picking your team really well right making sure that you're getting people that are skilled and experienced in your deal type in the deal size in your market and make sure that you're bringing the the right people and to support you and so anytime somebody asks on these strategy calls are you going to teach us how to do do due diligence we will teach you what red flags are we will teach you what the due diligence process looks like and you know what operational due diligences and all that stuff but like you're not going to be conducting due diligence yourself unless it's a very very very small very very very very simple deal you should not be doing your own due diligence that's how mistakes get made right um so you just want to make sure that you're picking really strong partners um that you can trust with their results and when you say not doing any of the due diligence obviously the searcher is going to be looking at the numbers of the business and looking at all of this information um so they're it's not like it's just going to all remain opaque so where is the line between the information that the searcher should be looking at and what falls on the other side of that line which is the due diligence that they should basically outsource to their to their team the thing that people talk to me most about is financial statements everybody's major concern is that they can't read financial statements or they can't read which just means that they don't feel proficient enough right and so when i say due diligence i should be more specific to say financial due diligence like you really want to rely on an accountant or someone with a financial due diligence background um because even like we've had again we have guest speakers every thursday either an interview or a guest speaker and we've had due diligence experts come in and say things are confusing right like this is not something you can learn in a book because there's so much nuance in small business accounting that it makes due diligence really hard and so you'll need to do your cursory you know reviews and make sure you understand the financials but the actual financial due diligence should probably be done by a due diligence expert unless you yourself have some you know skills and then you're not suffering from this problem chances are one of my recent guests um definitely followed this format where he really had a team actually he worked with a buy side advisory which is uh not something that i see very often but he did and so part of that large fee that he paid was due diligence so from the outset he had all of that outsourced but what he then did was he spent that much more time with the owners the sellers so he just you know just inve like all of that time just went toward that and that struck me and after the fact he said that that really paid dividends and that struck me as as a great point because it's like that's the one thing that you the searcher buyer of the business that you uniquely can do nobody you can't outsource that even if you wanted to and it's just so it's so valuable to build that trust and to build that credibility and rapport so maybe it's like you know if you're if you're tempted to pour over the you know the finances one more time think instead about maybe picking up the phone and or whatever you know getting coffee with your seller one more time and investing that hour there rather than you know looking at the finances which you should be kind of outsourcing anyway now analysis paralysis i know i know this is another big one i mean it's really analysis paralysis afflicts many people during any big decision in life not just buying a business but talk to me about how it plays to in the members of the lab i think what i see here most is like the incessant need for information and i understand that it's kind of um uh it's a safety mechanism i think of sorts it's someone feels like if they look for more and more and more information that they won't make a mistake there's not enough information out there for you to look at that's going to prevent a mistake from being made that is always going to be a risk if you analyze and analyze for two years the risk is still there right because the greatest risk is actually in yourself and you're looking externally for all this information when in essence it's whether or not you are the right person to to build this business and make it grow right it's like or to buy this business and make it grow and so i think that our members will get into this uh cycle of needing more and more and more information before we've been putting in an loi like our members like so i have conversations with people that haven't closed yet because they'll start spinning and wondering why they haven't closed yet and i asked the question well how many lois have you put in and it's always zero and i'm like okay why like and it's they're treating the the lois as if it's like this very prestigious step that can't like you can't do an loi until you're absolutely sure you should buy the business i'm like no no no no like let's chill because then they also burn their brand with their with the brokers and the sellers because they're asking for gobs of information that's really inappropriate for with the stage that they're at that's one of the lists on my um or items on my to-do list is i really want to give our members a phased like information request list so that they can understand like oh yeah you shouldn't be asking for this at this stage because it's not really appropriate and it's going to hurt your brand um yeah and so i think that you they run into that issue and it's like they just want more and more information and when the essence is they haven't they haven't solved the internal issue right it's the clarity that they're the right person to buy the business that's missing and they're just trying to uh answer that question with external information and and is this are you talking specifically about folks who ask for all this information pre-loi or does this phenomenon also occur post loi oh it's a super super post lli too my favorite saying was a broker reached out and said you know are are they looking to buy a business or they'd be looking for reasons not to buy a business yeah and it made it clicked and i was like they are looking to buy a business but their anxiety is driving them to keep asking for more information and keep digging and to over complicate deal structure oh heavens does that happen where suddenly they're like trying to they've got the most complicated deal structure possible and it's because they're trying to mitigate all these little risks without really stepping back and realizing that none of them are material uh the greater risk that they haven't mitigated is their own but they're still not sure if they should be buying a company okay on on the imposter syndrome that you just that you just alluded to i know that is also something that afflicts searchers talk to me about imposter syndrome it's that right like everybody that i talk to isn't sure if they got the right background to buy a business very few people are super confident and know that they can figure it out no matter what that's the confidence that it requires for you to take that leap of faith at the end because like no matter you could spend a million dollars in due diligence on a million dollar deal and not be confident enough not be 100 sure you should buy a business like it's always going to require a leap of faith in yourself that no matter what didn't get uncovered you'll figure it out because you always do like that leap of faith is required and so in my opinion um what what i've heard anyway the lab does is it helps battle that imposter syndrome because you start to see other people that have executed and you realize that they're just like you and you know they have a similar background to you or they've done similar things to you or they're just as basic and simple as you are like i've had members i have a member he's a i love him he's a wonderful human and he told me he was just a dumb grunt when i when we were building his value proposition by her profile that he didn't really do anything significant that is not true at all i talked to him for two and a half hours and basically just had him talk to me about everything he's done in his life and he's done tremendous things and so then our buyer branding advisor worked with him to build a value proposition by her profile he's actually extremely impressive people tend to downplay their accomplishments because they don't see them as that big of a deal but in the grand scheme of being a business owner something that seems rote to you might actually be significant right as a as an operator and so the work that we do for the first four weeks those live workshops in my opinion it builds clarity it builds confidence and that that's really the work that drives execution the people that are challenged i always come back to well do you have a what's your value proposition and that's where they start to get a little challenge where they're not entirely sure what their value proposition is and i kind of talk about it like the business is a puzzle right and so every time you look at a listing you need to be able to see the missing piece and whether or not you fit into that puzzle right so you need to know what you look like as a buyer and what your unique value proposition is i was on a sales call yesterday and a gentleman was like i don't know if i have a value prop it's possible that you don't it's possible that you shouldn't buy a business right but you should do the work to figure that out because i truly feel like everybody has a value proposition now it doesn't mean you should buy a business maybe not right and we always say our goal isn't that everyone buys a business in the lab our goal is that you feel more educated and prepared and comfortable with whatever decision you make whether that's buying a business or not we've had multiple members not decide that this isn't for them and that's okay i would much rather you do that than sign a personal guarantee for millions of dollars and be trapped in a business you don't want to be doing i i want to selfishly raise my hand here for for acquiring minds this this phenomenon of just like me or just like you and seeing other people that have done it i really think that's part of the whole mission of this podcast is to just show case after case after case of people who have actually gone down this what seems like a really daunting road to many people and have done it and have done it really successfully some of them wildly spectacularly successfully so um yeah that there and and i i'm i'm no different um the more people i interview and and interacting with people in the lab the more um attainable it all it all seems the more normal it seems like this isn't weird people are buying businesses all day long to anyone else what the lab does aside from holding your hand as you buy a business it gives you a community of like-minded folks right if you mention to like bob your neighbor that you're buying a business he's gonna look at you like you're nuts we all know that because everybody gets that reaction yeah like people i tell people what i do and they're like wait you do what which has always been my whole career so that's nothing new but it's it's beautiful to have a community of people that don't think you're crazy when that's all you're facing externally in your world so yeah hands down chelsea before we move on to the next one i just want to um this might be splitting hairs but imposter syndrome is one thing is there a cold feet phenomenon where at the last minute somebody just can't can't pull the trigger which is slightly different than you know imposter syndrome is kind of like this longer standing thing cold feet is like i'm about to walk down the aisle and i i can't bring myself to do it um so slightly different there is does that ever happen it hasn't for the lab from a buyer it has happened from sellers like sellers have shut down the deal immediately like the week of close we've had three in one week um happen that way so but not the buyers i think but i think it's different because our members and maybe i'm wrong maybe i'm giving the program too much credit but our members are in it and doing so much work to get there that i feel like they're they fall out before they would get to the finish line what you see is the people that get cold feet don't put in lois they get cold feet before doing the loi um and so i feel like if you made it all the way through due diligence and all that stuff you're pretty much in it right um now i will tell you they all feel like they're going to throw up they all say oh what am i doing my whole life is over i've gotten more than one call from them like right after closing where they're like the fetal position and they're panicking um and so it's not easy i shouldn't be laughing but it's it is kind of funny because it's a torture because i like we all know that they'll come out of it so much so that i brought in a um a psychologist to talk about the change management process and because i recognize because i'm trained in it as a psychologist i recognize that they're just on a change journey that everyone goes through and you just have to write it out and you'll come back out on the other side but nobody knows that if you're not trained in this method right and so i realized that so that's when i brought somebody in to do a workshop around change so that they could be like okay yes i'm in the fetal position now but in you know just a few short weeks i'll be out of it it's fine you you referred to the guy who sees himself as a a dumb grunt and and helping him develop and and everybody in the lab developing their their value proposition and their brand you've actually referred to this a few times now and as somebody who's gone through the lab i know that this is really core to the philosophy of the entire your entire approach um so talk to us about that it's i found that so interesting and and um yeah it's in retrospect now that i've learned it from you all it seems like such an obvious and important step in this process and it is it's kind of so when i first joined um walker and um karen who is our buyer branding advisor um they were using resumes like everyone uses and we all talked about how a resume doesn't really show who you are as a buyer right it shows the various roles that you've played as an employee as an employee but it doesn't really show the value that you would bring to a company that you're buying and the whole thing about all of everything in case you haven't learned in lab yet is messaging right and so it's all about the messaging that of how it's how the loan works it's how your interactions with the sellers work it's your brand it's all about messaging and so we decided to kind of create what we call the value proposition buyer profile which does meet a resume requirement it's just a different form called a functional resume and so what it does is it positions you as a buyer and a very specific buyer and so i get questions all the time from people about competition like is there competition among members if there's that many members they're going to be competing for deals and i can honestly say we've never had competing people because typically their value proposition is different so even if they're both looking for home care companies or sas companies one is going to be looking for something that looks different than the other like one might have a background in sales and marketing and the other one might have a background in operations and so this one's going to be looking for a company that needs operations but they don't have any sales and marketing back experience so they can't add value there whereas this one's going to be looking for something that has that need sales and marketing because that's their value and so they can't both buy the same company because it doesn't need them right if this person bought this company they would fail because they can't add value to sales and marketing they're an operations person and so because everyone's kind of looking for a very distinct business not just a type of business it's a business that needs the skills and value that they've honed over their career in their lifetime we don't really have you know conflict there's been a few situations where people are bidding for the same business but they don't know it i know it because i'm looking at the listings with them but they don't know it and so the value proposition is really just taking the time to figure out what you've done what you don't want to do anymore what you would like to do and what all of those achievements and accomplishments are that you could then introduce to a business right whether that's digital marketing or operations or process improvement or new product lines everybody has like a different flavor if you do not figure that out hands down that is almost always the reason someone is not moving on their search because when they look at a listing they don't see that how they fit in that business what value they'll add and so i always tell people i just had this conversation actually with a member from cohort eight so we're about to launch cohort 20. and so cohort eight he's like i've talked to 19 uh of our closers and i've talked to blah blah blah this man is oh he's so brilliant everybody just loves information and so i asked him i said okay so you've had all these conversations with all these people i haven't even talked to our closers that much about post clothes right and so um how many lli's have you put in and he said zero and i said okay so you have now researched the living daylights out of acquisition entrepreneurship but when we talked it all came down to he doesn't know what his value proposition is and so when he looks at listings he can't pull the trigger because he can't see it clearly how he's going to grow the business and it all comes back to the value proposition so much so that we just kind of um for your cohort kind of tweaked it so that we could spend even more time diving into the value proposition because it is the hardest thing for people to develop and i already offer a monthly workshop on refining your target statement because your value proposition is based in your target statement but even that wasn't enough and so it is the hardest it's very there's a lot of work as you know that goes into reflecting on who you are and what type of role you should be playing in a business and what you enjoy doing um and the successes that you've had and so it takes a lot of work um but hands down i i have been told repeatedly that it's it's the key to closing quickly and and just and just to um make this a little feel a little bit more concrete it is a very kind of internal psychological frankly process but at the end of it at least in the lab you also have something concrete which is this target statement and that's what you lead with when you're reaching out to brokers to for you know for more information about a listing so um it does it does take a you know a tangible form after you've gone through this work and talk to me about how um you know when when brokers you hear back from brokers that they can tell when they're when they're interacting with uh one of the lab members because of how you know the start this how the kind of professional and and um uh what's the word just self-directed this target statement comes across well the whole point of what we do week two and week three is to give you a branding packet right so this is a very saturated market there are so many people out there kicking the tires on the idea of buying a business that brokers are having a hard time figuring out who's serious and who's not right and so our goal was that we would give you guys something that you could reach out to brokers and sellers with it would give them a really strong first impression and so that's your buyer profile and that's your pre-approval letter and so when you reach out to a broker and you're like hey here's who i am and the buyer profile is top of it is your target statement and then the below that is all the things that you've done that's going to make you the right buyer for this business that you're trying to buy hands down like we've gotten emails from brokers telling us i mean you've heard it because karen shared one of them but about how serious they can take you because you've done all of this work that no one else that they're talking to is doing and so hands down our members are being accepted over uh private equity um offers they're getting chosen not being the most expensive offer it's because they're focused so heavily on their brand and making sure all the things that we talk about in the lab making sure that they're building the strong relationships um that's how they get pocket listings so we've had a handful of members not get listings that they initially look at with a broker but they'll get a call from the broker because they're top of mind as a serious investor that's going to close the biggest thing you want to lead with as a first-time buyer is that you are there's a certainty to close for you that's all the broker cares about that's why they're asking you about financials that's why they want to know the questions they're asking is just gauging whether or not you're actually going to close or not if they and that's where gender in my opinion comes in a little bit i think women are presumed not to close a lot more than men are um and so i think that the the buyer profile is just a very strong way to come across as a buyer it backs up who you say you are and it paints a very clear picture of why the business needs you it's great for lenders too right it tells a great story as to why they should lend to you um it's all about storytelling great well we're we're uh getting tight on time here chelsea want to i want to make sure we get to the the remaining three reasons that searchers fail in their search so what next i have overly rigid with their search criteria the target statement is an is like a north star but what i found is people will be so rigid like if if something has 780 000 in an sde and they're looking for 800 000 they're not going to look at it it's like okay so yes it has 780 000 that's not quite 800 000 um but there might be things there that you're going to easily add 20 000 back in and give you the sd you're looking for um and so i feel like there's a little bit of a lack of flexibility when people some people will just anchor in real tight on their target statement and then we have the opposite where they won't anchor in at all on their target statement and they're looking at deals that are not going to address their um goals at the end of the day you have some goals right and so i just think that you're gonna have a target statement um but you should have like a plus or minus right as far as if you need if you have an 800 as the base but you can actually live with 750 then put 750 as your base and use 750 right in your own mind or actually in the target statement and in the message you're communicating to brokers as well i would put it in the target statement right so that they're not excluding ones that actually give you what you're looking for um or when if you want to use it as your own internal criteria and leave it 800 that's fine just make sure that you're not eliminating things that could actually and again i'm not saying request information and spend two days on something that isn't going to meet your needs but just give it a quick once over right if you see a way that you might be able to streamline expenses with that type of business then pers look through it a little bit more right and chelsea are are people on on this on this point of being overly rigid in their criteria is it almost always the financial criteria or are there other ways people can be too picky is it just come down to the but their ebitda target pretty much no i mean there are other ways right like for example we get a lot of we have i would i think it's crazy i would think i'd be safe to say 50 of our members are engineer degrees or in the engineering profession which i think is hilarious um but there's a little bit of rigidity to target statement um industry right or like type of business you're looking for like we'll get people coming in wanting to do sas businesses there are a lot of opportunities out there that aren't sas um because sas is a whole different market like they value things differently their their multiples are significantly higher like for the buy then build method to work in the sas world you're going to fall below a million in sales and then it's like you're kind of buying a startup in the sas world so it's a little tricky right however if you have an i.t background being able to pivot and think about how to use that sas background to develop proprietary software for a different company that then you can sell to everyone is a much smarter way to leverage that background and i feel like that there's not always an openness to kind of consider that as soon as they hear it then it's like oh yeah and so i would just challenge people to kind of broaden what you're looking for and think of unique ways that you can leverage your experience um so that's people being overly rigid uh in their search uh number six would be the opposite people get desperate and they get and they get loose how does that work so without fail i kid you not without fail at the three month mark uh somewhat three weeks and then again at three months but definitely at the three month mark i will start getting calls like what am i doing wrong i haven't found a business yet i'm like what cohort were you in and they'll tell me and i'm like so you've been searching for three months and they're like yeah i'm like okay so a chill the average search takes eight to ten months in the lab 18 if you're looking at stanford research right and i think current research is actually like 19.3 i think i read a couple days ago um and so what happens and i had literally had this happen somebody was coming in to buy a sas company they called me it was maybe five or six months in their defense still too soon um and they wanted to buy the napa auto parts store down the street and i'm like okay so are we now very passionate about napa auto parts and the sd was wrong right it was like a thrown off a hundred and twenty five thousand an sd i think and this person was wanting four hundred thousand nesting or something like that and what it would boil down to is well and what it boils down to is desperation is that they just wanted to buy a business and i don't blame them nobody wants to search searching sucks let's be real here right it's a lot of work you know you can go down different rabbit holes and spend a lot of time and not see the rewards but the biggest mistake you could possibly make in my my opinion just chelsea's opinion is changing your target out of desperation like we the lab every meeting starts with we're all here to buy a business but not at the expense of making a mistake right these are expensive decisions you're making with large implications and so if you know what you want and you know what you need don't change it out of desperation you can change it out of clarity i have 100 will support you changing it out of clarity meaning you've done your due diligence in like the non-m a term like you've done the work to um understand that what you were originally looking for isn't actually what you want like we had a member by the fitness equipment company i was telling you about he came in as a sas buyer uh self-funded he found a company i think he did four lois and by the fourth one he realized he didn't actually want sas at all he doesn't like sas what he liked was sas as a product and so when he stripped that away what he actually likes is products and so he ended up buying a product company and he bought a huge product company and ended up being an independent sponsor and buying it with investors and so that entire target statement changed but i support it because it changed because of clarity not desperation he did the work and he realized that what he was originally looking for wasn't actually what was going to make him happy um and to me that's a 100 support that what i don't support is you calling me tell me you want to buy kentucky fried chicken down the street because you just want to own a business and it sounds like part of the problem here is that people have unrealistic expectations of how long this should take so if you're getting calls at month three people being like why haven't i found a business yet they just they obviously haven't haven't done their homework in terms of how long this with the average i don't think that's it i don't think so i think it's an emote everything about buying a business is emotional and i think at the three-month mark when you haven't found a business it starts creating doubt and that doubt triggers into impatience because it's like well if i haven't found a business yet i'm doing something wrong or i shouldn't be buying a business or and it's it's it's more just like chill out it's the change firm again this damn change curve comes up of your time right you start doubting that what you're doing is the right decision if you just wait it out it kind of works itself out and it does like the person that i the last person to do this to me is under loi and working through due diligence he just got his term term sheet from the bank and he sent me a meme you know about how as soon as he got the loy signed right and but it is about being patient right and you just have to it's like dating like i know that i'm not gonna meet my husband super fast right doesn't mean i'm not i don't get impatient about it right but i waited after my first husband i waited and i found the right guy um but you just have to be patient right great last one not doing the work required for deal flow yeah so like i said searching sucks there is no there's no silver bullet like there are services out there that are deal origination services and they'll find deals off market for you there's challenges that come with off-market deals though that we won't get into here if you want a deal that has a higher likelihood of closing then you want to look at listed deals right the challenge is that the listed deals are there's a gazillion brokers out there and they're all on their websites and if you go to aggregators the aggregators don't seem to clean up their website so who knows if the deal is actually live or not and so what you have to be doing is doing the tedious work of going on the brokers pages looking at the listings requesting information talking to the broker saying like the deal don't like the deal building that rapport and there's no fast way of doing it in my opinion and giving you the the the strong like um branding you know building your brand with brokers um other than you doing it and so what i find is when people are struggling either they haven't been able to do an loi or um they're not closing as fast as they think they should when i ask them how many brokers have you signed up with their mailing lists how many deals have you have you searched you know looked into seriously it all boils back to they're not doing enough of the daily activities to get the deal flow it's all the numbers game like we give you a score card in week one to kind of track your daily activities um because it really is a numbers game like you just have to keep we joke we we don't really joke but like we reference it as a flywheel right like you do these daily activities and it gets the flywheel moving and as soon as the flywheel starts spinning it will not stop like our closers are sending deals to our members because they're still they're still getting action right um and so but if you don't do it you're not going to get the deal flow and the numbers are going to decrease it's like job applications right you always hear like it's a numbers game you just have to keep putting them out there until one hits fine like david yeah uh chelsea before i let you go i did you did mention um women and how they're received a little bit differently in the market you you have you have a hunch that have perceived a little bit differently in the market than men um obviously acquiring a business is heavily male dominated all you have to do is look at look at the the guests on acquiring minds to to realize that um the acquisition lab you see it there as well uh but for for women listeners or really anybody who might be interested in this topic talk just talk to me about what you what you what your observations are about women who might want to buy a business i do think that there's a level of what's the word i feel like they're more they're more easily dismissed by sellers by brokers so they're not taken as seriously um that i was just talking to so we once a month on the second tuesday i think of the month and the women of the lab meet and talk about what it is to be a woman in the search process or just in general just have sounding boards for one another right um we have had sellers just blindly say no i'm not talking to you because it was a manufacturing company and it's a woman trying to buy the manufacturing company um the number one advice that we've kind of talked to is that you need to lead with money they need to know that you have money and that you are the decision maker like not to get into like the socialization of it but like i've noticed i've always been the primary breadwinner in my family right the house wasn't my name our cars were in my name until my we're starting to pivot now that my husband has been in the work world for a while um but i still i like the house is in my name and the the deed is made out to him and so it's like i think that the way that we're socialized um women just come across different challenges um just like ours our minority members come across different challenges than than you know the majority white male at least in my experience again it's not statistically significant so i can't speak to it but i i can just say the things that i'm hearing from our members are different um like they do the same things um but they're perceived differently so like when a woman does something and one of our male members do this does the same damn thing because they're all using the same advice yeah um they're perceived very differently um and so um we have about 29 women i think now so right around 10 percent of our base seems to always be women we don't get many female applicants so if anyone's listening and you're considering buying a business please please consider joining the lab if for nothing more just to get the female support um and then we haven't had any female closers yet we have one that's set to close in two weeks and i'm really excited about that um we've had one her deal fell apart the week of closing um the other thing is the women that um are are able to succeed a little bit easier have worked at very large companies and so i don't know if that helps a little bit but they've all worked for very large names or are currently working for very large names um the other ones seem to have a little bit more of a challenge okay well chelsea not to say they're not qualified because they're just as qualified yeah yeah it's it probably just adds to the perception thing if they have a big name on their resume maybe that it just helps that penetrate the bias a little bit i think so chelsea let's leave it there this has been very valuable how can people get in touch with you if they want to learn more about the lab is it directly to you or is it why don't you give us your your contact information for you yourself personally and then for the lab generally yeah so you can um reach out to me at any point at chelsea c-h-e-l-s-e-a at buythenbuild.com um you can find us in our free facebook group i'm active there so you can always you know reach out to me on facebook um because i run that free group and then um you can and what's that free group chelsea how do i search in facebook to find the free buy then build right search the buy and build okay awesome um there's about 5 000 people in there it's not vetted um but it's a very active community um and then uh to look into the lab you can go to acquisitionlab.com uh for a summary you can go to acquisitionlab.com forward slash overview our homepage is very wordy so if you want to cut through the words and just see the basics go to forward slash overview you can also read about our team of advisors on there um and you can apply directly on our website we have a couple seats um left but we're not running a cohort over the summer um we'll only have one in july um and then we'll have one in september okay and you can also ask me personally uh what what it's like to to be a member and you'll hear my resounding endorsement of it it's been awesome chelsea thank you so much for coming on and sharing with these these um these things that searchers need to watch out for in their own psychology i appreciate the opportunity thank you for having me